O.J. Simpson must give any money a Florida lawyer is holding for him to the family of murder victim Ronald Goldman to help satisfy a multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment, a judge has ruled. An L.A. County Superior Court judge said Tuesday that "any and all monies, accounts receivable and all other rights to payment" held by attorney Leonardo D. Starke for Simpson must be assigned to Goldman's father, Fred.

A federal jury Thursday awarded $210,000 in punitive damages to a former Los Angeles County Jail inmate who said sheriff's deputies repeatedly assaulted him in 1998. The verdict, returned before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick J. Walsh in Los Angeles, came two days after jurors awarded inmate Anthony Albert Jimenez $155,000 as compensation for his injuries. Jimenez contended that deputies assaulted him on three dates at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility near downtown Los Angeles.

U.S. Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) has introduced a bill to speed up federal benefit payments to former workers of Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory who can link their illnesses to their jobs at the onetime Department of Energy facility. In the last seven years, 355 former employees have filed 677 benefit claims against the DOE, but only 56 claims have been paid, according to Gallegly's office. The claims were filed under the Energy Employees Illness Compensation Act.

Former jockey Laffit Pincay was awarded a judgment of $2.7 million by a jury in Pasadena on Monday, the culmination of a lawsuit against Huntington Ambulance regarding the spill that ended his career more than four years ago. Pincay, 60, had reached an out-of-court settlement early last year with Santa Anita and the physician's assistant who treated him immediately after the accident on March 1, 2003, during a race on the hillside turf course at the Arcadia track.

A federal judge signed off on a $1.52-billion jury verdict in favor of Alcatel-Lucent in a digital music patent dispute against Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. U.S. District Court Judge Rudi M. Brewster in San Diego entered his judgment Monday, concluding that Microsoft's Windows Media Player software infringed patents owned by the Paris-based company.

A settlement for the family of a teenager who died after being roughed up by guards at a state-supervised boot camp won legislative approval and was sent to the governor. Gov. Charlie Crist had encouraged the effort to compensate the family of Martin Lee Anderson, who died in January 2006 shortly after being kneed, struck and having ammonia tablets held to his nose at the military-style facility run by the Bay County Sheriff's Office in Panama City.

Chinese slave laborers forced to work in Japan during World War II lost their bid for compensation when Japan's Supreme Court overturned a landmark ruling that had ordered a Japanese company to pay them. In 2004, the Hiroshima High Court ordered Nishimatsu Construction Co. to pay a total of $230,000 to five Chinese. Nishimatsu argued that the statute of limitations had expired.

Holocaust survivors from around the world pressed Poland's government to compensate them for property confiscated after World War II. Attempts to resolve the issue have failed, mostly because of concern over the cost. Poland had Europe's biggest Jewish community until World War II, when the Nazis killed nearly 90% of the country's 3.3 million Jews. Postwar communist rulers seized their property.

A San Diego jury on Thursday told Microsoft Corp. to pay $1.52 billion for infringing patents underpinning the world's most popular digital music standard, known as MP3. The verdict, one of the largest patent awards on record, could open other technology companies to massive liability. Virtually every portable digital music player uses MP3 technology to read music files, including Apple Inc.'s iPod.

The California Supreme Court made it possible Thursday for people who become ill from smoking to once again win large judgments from tobacco companies, unanimously rejecting a four-year-old federal court decision that had virtually halted all smoker lawsuits in the state. "It reopens tobacco litigation in California," said Northeastern University Law Professor Richard A. Daynard, who heads a group that promotes lawsuits against the industry. "The light just went from red to green."